Reform Lost In Schools, Report Says

Researchers Pin Blame On City, Teachers

November 01, 1994|By Jacquelyn Heard, Tribune Education Writer.

Chicago public schools are by and large no better than they were five years ago when, after decades of failure, they grabbed the national spotlight as the model for school reform, a recent report says.

Test scores are still low, classroom violence continues apace, and the dropout rate is still so high that only about half the students who enter high school graduate, according to the findings of the Heartland Institute, a public policy research center based in Palatine.

"Chicago was seen as the landmark, the one to watch, but now the eyes of the nation are turned elsewhere because what they've seen in Chicago is basically stagnant results," said Michael Finch, an official of the not-for-profit group.

Finch said the 22-page report is based on data collected from the Illinois State Board of Education, the Chicago Panel of Public School Policy and Finance, and the Illinois State Police.

The report, "Chicago School Reform: First Annual Evaluation," authored by Northwestern University law professor Daniel Polsby, concluded that while there have been scattered gains in student achievement, standardized test scores for 3rd, 6th, 8th and 11th graders have either remained low or declined in core subjects such as math and reading during the five-year period.

City schools are nearing the end of the five years that reformers initially said it would take to see results, but the reformers insist it is still too early to judge reform by test results.

"It may be too early to say that Chicago's school-reform effort is a total flop and should be thrown out the window," Finch said, "but it's not too early to say it's been pretty much a failure up to this point."

The report said reform has not worked largely because politicians, school administrators, teachers and parents have not been held accountable. "Basically, City Hall and the Chicago Teachers Union have the system in a stranglehold," Finch said.

Cities such as Baltimore and Hartford, Conn., have recently turned to privatizing all or part of the public schools in an effort to reform cash-strapped and failing systems. Meanwhile, public schools in Milwaukee are experimenting with a controversial voucher program, allowing students to use public-school money to attend private schools.

"Chicago schools were and still are at the bottom. Are we to wait another five years and allow another generation of children to pass through before we look at other alternatives?" Finch asked. "I don't see how trying any of these new methods that other schools are trying would hurt."

Still, almost as soon as Finch's group released its dim findings on Monday, city school officials and reformers were bashing the report as a "pump piece" for the controversial voucher system, which the reformers say Heartland supports.

School reformers charged that the report fails to take into account the gains students made in writing and math on the Illinois Goals Assessment Program test last year. The report covered 1988, the year the School Reform Act was passed by the General Assembly, through 1992-93.

The report is a "selective and biased evaluation," according to leaders of the reform group, Designs for Change. They said the report arbitrarily ignored 11 reading, writing and math test results that showed improvements between 1990 and 1994.

"(Heartland) bills the report as an analysis of the progress of school reform over five years, but, in fact, the report focuses primarily on data from the first and second year of school reform," Designs for Change director Don Moore said in a seven-page rebuttal issued Monday.

City school officials were equally critical.

"In its rush to be another bearer of bad news about Chicago schools, the Heartland Institute ignores the progress made by Chicago public schools over the last five years," schools spokeswoman Dawne Simmons said. "This does a serious disservice to the many local school council members, parents, teachers, principals and business leaders who are working hard to make reform work."

But the Heartland report maintains that hard work alone is not a measure of success in city schools, better student achievement is.

"There's no question that enthusiasm is high. There are good intentions aplenty," Finch said. "The real question is whether and how far these increased efforts actually have had a measurable payoff in relation to the educational priorities set by the (school reform) law-reading, writing, mathematics and higher order thinking skills."

Still, Simmons said, "Some of the Heartland Institute's information is just plain wrong."

For instance, the report states "there is a widespread perception that Chicago public schools are becoming increasingly dangerous places." However, it then gives data on arrests on or near school property that indicates that violence has decreased. In the 1990-91 school year, the report said, there were 9,820 arrests; in 1992-93, 9,790 arrests; and in 1993-94, 8,600.

The Heartland report found that the attendance figures for Illinois schools have remained relatively stable over time, averaging about 93 percent. But the Chicago public school attendence rate over the five years has been "highly variable," rising to 89.2 percent in 1990-91, then falling to a historic low of 86 percent in 1991-92. The rate rebounded to 89.1 percent in 1992-93, the report said.

The researchers concluded that "it is too soon to tell whether this is a new up trend or merely a blip in the old down trend."

"According to most of the indicators reported here, it is apparent that school reform has not yet improved the quality of public education in Chicago," the report said. "If we had an educational emergency before school reform, it appears that we still have one."